CollegeHumor: Regret Everythinghttp://www.collegehumor.comhttp://www.collegehumor.com/articles/column/regret-everything
Funny Videos, Funny Pictures, Funny Links!/post/6881189http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6881189/why-beyonce-and-jay-z-need-to-break-up
Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400<p><!-- teaser --><div id="teaser">
<p><em>In &quot;Regret Everything&quot; comedian Will Hines tells us what thoughts have been gnawing at his brain.</em><br />
<a href="//www.collegehumor.com/article/6881189/why-beyonce-and-jay-z-need-to-break-up"><div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/66/87/0b7c58d0b4496484a3af4bdf753c3976.jpg" width="600" height="250" /></div></div></a></p>
<p>I like Taylor Swift songs, especially when she&#039;s mad at some guy (i.e. all Taylor Swift songs). Were I Taylor&#039;s manager, the first thing I would do is try to get her next boyfriend to break up with her, preferably in a way that stings her melody-attracting, harmony-provoking romantic pride. <br />
&quot;You didn&#039;t hear it from me, but I saw her Facebooking with Kevin Peters,&quot; I&#039;d tell Connor Kennedy or whoever she was dating. &quot;Might be time for the talk. She&#039;s got free time right before the Grammys.&quot;</p>
</div><!-- /teaser --></p>
<p><!-- readmore --></p>
<p><em>In &quot;Regret Everything&quot; comedian Will Hines tells us what thoughts have been gnawing at his brain.</em><br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/66/87/0b7c58d0b4496484a3af4bdf753c3976.jpg" width="600" height="250" alt="Why Beyonce and JayZ Need to Break Up - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
I like Taylor Swift songs, especially when she&#039;s mad at some guy (i.e. all Taylor Swift songs). Were I Taylor&#039;s manager, the first thing I would do is try to get her next boyfriend to break up with her, preferably in a way that stings her melody-attracting, harmony-provoking romantic pride. <br />
&quot;You didn&#039;t hear it from me, but I saw her Facebooking with Kevin Peters,&quot; I&#039;d tell Connor Kennedy or whoever she was dating. &quot;Might be time for the talk. She&#039;s got free time right before the Grammys.&quot;<br />
I do not take joy out of anyone&#039;s personal romantic suffering, but a man needs his pop music and happy artists are boring ones.<br />
Even better: get Adele to fall in love with Taylor&#039;s boyfriend and sing an album full of desperate, soulful-but-still-accessible longing. Now I&#039;m getting two great albums out of one heartbreak! I&#039;m a monster, but one that respects efficiency.<br />
<span class="caps">EVEN</span> <span class="caps">MORE</span> <span class="caps">AWESOME</span> would be to have Kanye West fall desperately in love with Taylor Swift and her to reject it! Given his oft-memed interruption of her award at the 2009 <span class="caps">MTV</span> video music awards, the ironic tragedy of his unrequited love would propel him to an overproduced masterpiece!<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/31/84/20bed0e2822d817dc5a81df4b2ce5c5f-why-beyonce-and-jay-z-need-to-break-up.jpg" width="290" height="201" alt="Why Beyonce and JayZ Need to Break Up - Image 2" /></div></div><br />
Generally, I&#039;m a moral person. But when it comes to my pop music, my brain shifts fully into evil villain mode. No heartbreak is too horrible for the sake of making my Spotify playlists more terrific! These pop stars are no longer human: they are machines. Machines of sadness that totally get what it means to land a solid pop hook.<br />
Given unlimited funds, I would not pursue political power nor lobby to help society. But I would conspire to make Rihanna mad at someone, and then provide ample studio time and a sick rhythm section.<br />
My ultimate plan is perhaps too horrible to even write down. But here it is:<br />
For the sake of the towering pop masterpiece it would inspire, I would implore Jay-Z to divorce Beyonce. Not just divorce, but publicly <span class="caps">DUMP</span> in the most devastating way.<br />
Now, mind you carefully here, I do not take joy <span class="caps">DIRECTLY</span> out of Beyonce&#039;s suffering. I think she&#039;s super cool, as I believe any living human being with rational thought would. But the unfortunate truth is that Beyonce is at her best when fighting back from a heartbreak, and proving to the world that she is a survivor, irreplaceable, and beyond resentment. <br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/62/72/579424a54a2388405502c2898835df8d-why-beyonce-and-jay-z-need-to-break-up.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="Why Beyonce and JayZ Need to Break Up - Image 2" /></div></div><br />
If Jay-Z could somehow be convinced to make the admittedly dumb move of dumping Beyonce, I shudder to think of the power of the music that would be created. A pop opera filled with such deep rage that it would make Black Sabbath look like Ke$ha. An army of songwriters and producers would be summoned to craft a harrowing masterwork of anguish, vengeance and serious fucking beats.<br />
There&#039;s no phrase for it, but if you could take &quot;oh no he din&#039;t&quot; and raise it to the 100th power, put it in a microwave and then turn it into a member of the X-Men, that would be Beyonce&#039;s album.<br />
Yes, it&#039;s horrible to contemplate. Jay-Z and Beyonce are perhaps the coolest couple in the nation. We respect them, as evidenced by how we don&#039;t try to reduce their names into one dumb term a la &quot;Bennifer&quot; or &quot;Brangelina.&quot; We love them too much to mangle their names. So I understand what a terrible thing I am asking for.<br />
But great art requires great sacrifice. Would you want John Lennon to have been well-adjusted and thus not had the Beatles? Would you want Picasso to be completely content and thus not have his magnificent blue period? Do you wish Sylvia Plath had been super-happy writing love-making tips for Cosmopoltian? Would you like Sesame Street better if it had been Oscar the Chill?<br />
So I ask you to hold your judgment, consider the quality of your iPhone&#039;s shuffle, and quietly hope for Jay-Z to create his 100th problem. For the sake of the music.<br />
<br />
</p>nonadultcomedy/post/6873786http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6873786/bands-that-did-their-damn-job
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500<p><!-- teaser --><div id="teaser">
<p><a href="//www.collegehumor.com/article/6873786/bands-that-did-their-damn-job"><div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/58/20/525deac63cc9a71bed4312d2ca415490-bands-that-did-their-damn-job.jpg" width="600" height="600" /></div></div></a>Here are the factors that determine if a musical artist is a &quot;Did Their Job&quot; kind of artist:<br />
<ol>
<li>The artist had several hits over several years (no one-hit wonders like <span class="caps">LFO</span> or Len, ugh)</li>
<li>The artist wrote his/her/their own songs (no song factories like Backstreet Boys or Britney or even Motown)</li>
<li>The artist is one who if someone said it was their favorite artist, you would burst out laughing.</li>
</ol></p>
<p><br />
Artists that did their job:
<ul>
<li>Goo Goo Dolls</li>
<li>Phil Collins</li>
<li>Sugar Ray</li>
<li>The Steve Miller Band</li>
<li>Owl City</li>
<li>Kenny Loggins</li>
<li>Matchbox 20</li>
<li>Neil Diamond</li>
<li>Huey Lewis and The Goddamn News</li>
</ul></p>
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<p><br />
In between &quot;guilty pleasures&quot; and &quot;true favorites&quot; are musical artists that are indeed bad but do deserve a certain begrudging respect. Prime example is the early &#039;80s arena rock and current karaoke favorites Journey. Journey is by and large cheesy and ungood. However, they had so many massive hits &#151; &quot;Don&#039;t Stop Believing,&quot; &quot;Faithfully,&quot; &quot;Separate Ways&quot; &#151; all lodged in the brains of so many people that you have to admit they did their job. Presuming their job was to make hit records, well, then Journey did its goddamn job.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/58/20/ec3f007c34aff65d5ab1502058da3472-bands-that-did-their-damn-job.jpg" width="290" height="290" alt="Bands That Did Their Damn Job - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
&quot;Bands That Do Their Job&quot; is a useful categorization. The term was coined by my younger brother Brian when we stumbled upon a &quot;Journey&#039;s Greatest Hits&quot; in a used CD store. &quot;Ugh&quot; I said. &quot;Terrible.&quot; But after a quick glance at the playlist my brother exclaimed &quot;These guys had a ton of hits!&quot; He presented the CD to me. &quot;They did their job,&quot; he concluded. &quot;You buy this now, they deserve it,&quot; he said, and so I did. I always respond to direct orders, as I am a robot.<br />
After a discussion that lasted, no exaggeration, ten years (spread out over Thanksgivings and occasional emails), we arrived <span class="caps">TODAY</span> at the factors which determines if a musical artist is a &quot;Did Their Job&quot; kind of artist:<br />
<ol>
<li>The artist had several hits over several years (no one-hit wonders like <span class="caps">LFO</span> or Len, ugh)</li>
<li>The artist wrote his/her/their own songs (no song factories like Backstreet Boys or Britney or even Motown)</li>
<li>The artist is one who if someone said it was their favorite artist, you would burst out laughing.</li>
</ol></p>
<p><br />
Artists that did their job:
<ul>
<li>Goo Goo Dolls</li>
<li>Phil Collins</li>
<li>Sugar Ray</li>
<li>The Steve Miller Band</li>
<li>Owl City</li>
<li>Kenny Loggins</li>
<li>Matchbox 20</li>
<li>Neil Diamond</li>
<li>Huey Lewis and The Goddamn News</li>
</ul></p>
<p><br />
It&#039;s a particular kind of band that fits into this grouping because they&#039;re both bad and good. They have to be good enough to make hits for some time. But they must be bad, also. Generally, they represent talented people or groups who seemed to have no aspirations of being interesting. They were happy with writing songs that would one day introduce corporate training videos or dumb montages in Wayans Brothers movies. <br />
&quot;Bands That Did Their Job&quot; are working man&#039;s bands. They show up, year and year, and get it done. But they don&#039;t make a fuss about it by doing anything innovative. That would be smug. Instead these guys are content to simply slap out a few top 10 hits and then get their almost-genius asses home for dinner. No one does drugs in any obvious way. You can imagine them all watching lots of TV. They name their kids with normal goddamn names.<br />
These are bands that you don&#039;t want to approve of, but you don&#039;t like other people ridiculing either. &quot;Hall and Oates are so bad&quot; someone will say. And you will snap back &quot;Hey, <span class="caps">THEY</span> <span class="caps">DID</span> <span class="caps">THEIR</span> <span class="caps">JOB</span>!&quot; Then you&#039;ll stomp angrily enough and no one will know why you are upset. I would understand.<br />
It&#039;s a moderate amount of respect. Like, no one should have a tattoo of Huey Lewis and the News, for heaven&#039;s sake. But if you don&#039;t absent-mindedly nod your head to &quot;If This Is It&quot; then you are a false human, made of synthetic plastic and lying to everyone about everything.<br />
We need to celebrate things that are this level of good. Too often, our society is focused on labelling things as <span class="caps">ONES</span> and <span class="caps">ZEROES</span>. Things are either <span class="caps">AMAZING</span> or <span class="caps">TERRIBLE</span>, it seems. &quot;Argo&quot; was <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">BEST</span> <span class="caps">MOVIE</span> <span class="caps">EVER</span>, or else &quot;Argo&quot; was <span class="caps">SUCH</span> A <span class="caps">PIECE</span> OF <span class="caps">CRAP</span>. Whereas neither is true, and we all know it! &quot;Argo&quot; was <span class="caps">IMPRESSIVELY</span> <span class="caps">OKAY</span>. Shout it from the rooftops, with a measured amount of quiet joy! &quot;<span class="caps">ARGO</span> <span class="caps">WAS</span> <span class="caps">IMPRESSIVELY</span> <span class="caps">OKAY</span> <span class="caps">AND</span> I&#039;M <span class="caps">NOT</span> <span class="caps">GOING</span> TO <span class="caps">COMPLIMENT</span> IT <span class="caps">ANYMORE</span>!&quot;<br />
Shouldn&#039;t we be happy with the middle? Most of US, in our daily routines, are merely &quot;doing our job.&quot; Few of us wake up and do things equal to the tastefulness of David Bowie or sheer talent of Fiona Apple or creativity of Arcade Fire or wacky originality of Joanna Newsome. No, we live our lives to the standard of reliable formulas of Boston, decent-but-forgettable melodies like Linkin Park and perfectly-adequate choruses of Avril Lavigne. <span class="caps">PERFECTLY</span> <span class="caps">ADEQUATE</span>: embrace its realistic level of validation.<br />
Although I admit that if you play more than like three Neil Diamond songs in a row, you do feel a bit gross.<br />
<br />
<br />
</p>nonadultcomedy/post/6871365http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6871365/what-i-learned-working-for-a-porn-magazine
Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:00:02 -0500<p><a href="//www.collegehumor.com/article/6871365/what-i-learned-working-for-a-porn-magazine"><div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/31/71/b5c8599f74a985ced95bd648605d8ea1.jpg" width="600" height="200" /></div></div></a><br />
This is the craziest job I&#039;ve ever had: For three summers during college I worked for a porn magazine, and what struck me most was that convicts have decent grammar.<br />
Although, that sentence has several exaggerations. The first of which is the phrase &quot;porn magazine.&quot; I did work for a pornographic periodical, but it wasn&#039;t an operation that hired models or took photos. It was a monthly collection of photos of celebrities being naked. That&#039;s a genre of porn magazine and it feels slightly less sleazy because it doesn&#039;t produce more pornography but simply gathers existing stuff and organizes it by starlet.</p>
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<p><br />
The next exaggeration is the phrase &quot;for,&quot; because I didn&#039;t really work directly <span class="caps">FOR</span> it, but I worked for its financial manager who, as part of his pay, owned all the back issues. My job was to mail the back issues to people who had ordered them. I&#039;d gathered the day&#039;s orders (all mailed in, as this was essentially pre-internet), enter them into an ancient computer, put issues into a brown paper envelope and then bring them to a rustic, quaint post office where some otherwise trusting people looked at me sideways as I bought postage for several dozen pounds of obscured filth.<br />
The <span class="caps">NEXT</span> exaggeration is &quot;worked&quot; because I was not that disciplined. In fact, rather than focus on my primary responsibility of processing orders of back issues of this magazine, I preferred to work on my secondary responsibility which was answering letters. See, readers of the magazine would occasionally write in with their concerns or requests. I would answer them, signing a fake name which was &quot;Malcolm Light, VP of Customer Service.&quot; My predecessor at the job made up the name, but I made up the title because even though I was shoveling recycled porn into brown envelopes, I cared about status.<br />
The letters were fascinating. These were people who had bought a porn magazine and cared enough about it that they took pen to paper. Typical topics were &quot;My issue was damaged. Can I get a replacement?&quot; &quot;I ordered my issue some time ago, when can I expect it?&quot; and &quot;Do you have any photos of Oprah Winfrey&#039;s bare feet?&quot; (Answers: &quot;No,&quot; &quot;soon&quot; and &quot;no comment&quot;).<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/36/95/113c0907640dfe0e9dc3ac6629cf438e.jpg" width="290" height="434" alt="What I Learned Working for a Porn Magazine - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
Judging by the handwriting, fans of this porn magazine were not frequent letter writers. Sloppy kerning, poor leading, inconsistent sizes made every letter look like a ransom note. <span class="caps">HOWEVER</span>, the tone was surprisingly polite. For example, people generally ended the notes with formal sign-offs: &quot;Would love a Bond girls issue. Regards, Stephen&quot; or &quot;Appreciate the nip slip from Michelle Pfeiffer. Sincerely, Mickey.&quot;<br />
A generous percentage of these writers were convicts. Convicts like porn magazines. They send money orders and they wait patiently. They pore over every detail of the product. And they were by and large the most polite and careful correspondents. I suppose they were aware the consequences of breaking rules and didn&#039;t want to do anything wrong that might delay the delivery of &quot;TV Sluts, Cable Edition.&quot; <br />
&quot;Decent&quot; grammar is an exaggeration since when you&#039;re requesting photos of butt-cracks, it shouldn&#039;t be called decent.<br />
I tried to answer their letters with an equal level of attentiveness and politeness. Frequent writers knew who I was and would address me directly. &quot;Mr. Light, you were very helpful in finding the photo spread of Julie Newmar and also Sade. Are there any S&amp;M themed back issues or else any that feature more behinds?&quot; <br />
Other insane things about this job: the office was at the financial manager&#039;s home, and he had two huge German Shepherds who barked every time I got up from my desk. So I had to wait for my boss to come into the room before it was safe for me to leave and go to the bathroom. Looking back, this might have been an actual sweatshop. It definitely broke clauses of the Geneva Convention. I didn&#039;t mind, because my boss was a charismatic guy who told great stories about doing drugs with 1970s country and western music stars, and had a metal valve in his aorta which you could hear if your ear was pressed to his chest, which he did to me twice.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/40/95/38ee8d884c90244cf67905fec7d22894.jpg" width="290" height="270" alt="What I Learned Working for a Porn Magazine - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
I also got paid under the table and never had to work past five.<br />
This was around 1990. I remember I first heard &quot;Losing My Religion&quot; while at this job. I already had lost mine, but that song was great. <br />
I had almost quit the first day since it was so strange. The dogs barking, the stack of dirty magazines in dusty shrink-wrap, the eccentric boss: it didn&#039;t feel welcoming. But before that I had worked in a pretentious British toy store in the mall. There aren&#039;t enough interesting things in the world to justify walking out of a place that strange. It was fun; I&#039;m glad I stayed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><i>Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6867879http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6867879/regret-everything-you-hate-my-bike
Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:00:03 -0500<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/68/32/4a5927c710f8312c0fbc32f0da400764.jpg" width="600" height="245" alt="Regret Everything: You Hate My Bike - Image 1" /></div></div>
<br />
<p>I hereby confess one of darkest, most distasteful sides of my personality: I own and ride a bicycle.<br />
I know, it&#039;s a tough thing to take. After all, it seems the only good thing bikes contribute to society is being something everyone else can all hate together. Pedestrians roll their eyes in annoyance as bikes glide by. Cars honk their horns in appalled irritation when they want to hug the curb. A few weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey looked ready to punch Lance Armstrong in the face. And I don&#039;t think it&#039;s because he had taken performance-enhancing drugs and then lied about it. It&#039;s because he rides a bike.<br />
</p>
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<p>I guess it&#039;s because bikes seem annoyingly in the way: too fast to ignore, but slow enough that cars have to go around. Still, the hate seems deeper. A few years ago, New York City added lots of bike lanes in an effort to make the roads more environmentally supportive. Since then I have never ridden in a taxi without the cab driver pointing out that the bike lanes are taking up so much of the road that the world has become completely ruined. Traffic can&#039;t function, the economy will soon collapse, and children no longer know right and wrong. I have been told that bike lanes are the worst thing to happen to this city while being driven by Ground Zero.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/76/20/93d7f26a010944b944dafcdf580459a2.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="Regret Everything: You Hate My Bike - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>Menace to Society</i></small></center><br />
When friends find out you ride a bike, the first thing they do is describe the most gruesome bike accident they ever witnessed. People don&#039;t do that with other life choices. When you announce you&#039;re newly dating someone, your friends don&#039;t immediately describe the most hostile divorce they&#039;ve ever heard of. But mention you have a bike and you&#039;ll hear &quot;I once saw two bike messengers run a red light and get run over by four trucks while their parents watched. Everyone&#039;s brains poured out of their ears and somehow two kittens drowned.&quot;<br />
Bikes are feared as if they were weapons. I have a bike that folds down to the size of a large briefcase. I once made the mistake of walking it into the lobby of an office building before beginning to fold it up. The security guard ran over, appalled. &quot;What do you think you&#039;re doing? You can&#039;t bring that in here? You have to take that outside immediately.&quot; The tone of his voice acted like I&#039;d walked in and started having sex with the plants. <br />
I love bikes. They&#039;re relatively small and light. Riding them makes me feel great. And they&#039;re quaintly 19th-century, a reminder of a simpler age before everyone was peering down at their light-boxes of infinite information. I can&#039;t see a bike without hearing harpsichord music and pining for penny candy. I&#039;m confident if you bike far enough at one shot you will grow a handlebar mustache.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/53/63/aa585e41b4812f8f84f3b444de9365e1.jpg" width="290" height="425" alt="Regret Everything: You Hate My Bike - Image 1" /></div></div><p align="right"><small><i><a href="//www.shutterstock.com/gallery-111418p1.html?cr=00&pl=edit-00">Hodag Media</a> / <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/?cr=00&pl=edit-00">Shutterstock.com</a></i></small></p><br />
Also, most importantly: for each bike present it means there&#039;s one less car. I know that people love their cars. But it is an inarguable fact that the most dangerous machine commonly used in society is the automobile. Cars are two-ton hunks of metal which hurtle forward at the speed of roller coasters and are piloted by people who just started puberty yesterday. Bikes can be dangerous, but not like cars. No one would be that scared by the headline &quot;Traffic Stopped By 18-Bike Pile-Up.&quot;<br />
I mean, I get that cars are more romantic. Bruce Springsteen would not have been famous if he had written &quot;Born to Bike.&quot;<br />
Look, I know, you know of a time that you saw a bike behave recklessly, even dangerously. And you know of a place where bikes are really just too much in the way. My point is that you will get more angry at this situation than is necessary. That you would swear and curse the bicyclist far more than you would a malfunctioning traffic light or a truck driver talking on a cellphone even though those circumstances are just as disruptive to traffic.<br />
The dumbest argument I ever had was while I was bicycling across Manhattan on 30th street. A gentleman, and I use that term sarcastically, rolled down the window of his Escalade and said &quot;Get out of the way!&quot;<br />
And I said &quot;I&#039;m not in the way!&quot;And he said &quot;Bike lane&#039;s too big! Bloomberg <span class="caps">SUCKS</span>!&quot; (referring to <span class="caps">NYC</span>&#039;s mayor; the Escalade had Jersey plates)And I said &quot;You&#039;ve got plenty of room!&quot;And then he said &quot;Screw off, asswipe!&quot;And I got flustered and said &quot;Yeah? you&#039;re an asswipe!&quot; as if I had thought of the term asswipe first, which was a dumb thing to say, and is more about my inability to get angry properly which is off-topic but my point is this guy had plenty of room but hated bikes.<br />
I have no answer to this problem. I&#039;m just going to keep riding and keep being hated. My only hope when someone yells at me is that nearby will be the only thing that drivers hate even more than bikes: a teenager crossing the street while texting. I can only hope.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><small>Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">Shutterstock</a> .</small></i></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6866282http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6866282/regret-everything-im-bad-at-drugs
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:00:03 -0500<p><em>Every week comedian Will Hines shares the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</em></p>
<p><br />
Drugs are great, right? Actually I wouldn&#039;t know because I am terrible at them.<br />
Meaning, my body doesn&#039;t seem to enjoy them as designed. A combination of being scared of breaking rules, emotional repression and some probably shitty body chemistry makes me terrible at altering my state. Which bums me out, as I grew up worshipping people who made a big deal out of loving drugs: Keith Richards, Hunter S. Thompson and most attractive girls at my college.<br />
If I may oversimplify a complicated social issue into a still-kinda-true topic sentence: Drugs are fun but also intimidating. Most are illegal, and have at least some risk of physical harm, perhaps a lot. To enjoy them, even in the most progressive environments, takes an emotional and physical leap of faith. I have no such faith. I&#039;m scared of everything. And I have the constitution of a leaf. I get bruised if I overhear a conversation about punching. But I do love 1960s guitar rock and 1970s short stories &#151; both of which are filled with references to cool drugs. <br />
So I&#039;ve tried things. But alas, running through the major categories of drugs is a decathalon of chemical failure.<br />
Speed and amphetamines: never really tried them except freshman year when I took a double dose of Vivran (caffeine in a pill) so I could stay up late and finish a particularly onerous drafting assignment. Drafting. Literally the squarest of all possible all-nighters.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/24/89/ddb406749d4903430f8babdbd99cc27f.jpg" width="290" height="290" alt="Regret Everything: Im Bad at Drugs - Image 1" /></div></div><small><i><center>&quot;Guys, I&#039;m so high right now.&quot;</center></i></small></p>
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<p><br />
I suppose coffee is a sort of muted version of speed, and I do love drinking it. Though if I have more than three cups in a 24-hour period I develop the digestive system of a bird. A bird with diarrhea.<br />
Smoking I never did. I&#039;m straight-up allergic to looking cool.<br />
Alcohol! I suppose because it&#039;s legal I don&#039;t have an emotional inhibition for this. But I&#039;ve had to cut this out as I can&#039;t tolerate the hangovers. If I drink too much, I&#039;ll have a physical hangover for a full day. And the emotional hangover of general guilt and sadness would last at most recent count: 22 years. So no more of that.<br />
Marijuana is, anecdotally at least, the most fun drug with the least physical consequences, but I never was able to enjoy it. First of all, I waited until I was 30 to try it. Even then the only reason I experimented was because I took an improv comedy class and met a kid named Frankie who vowed to &quot;smoke me up&quot; because &quot;it would be hilarious.&quot; He did indeed get me stoned, and I discovered that being on pot actually made my brain <span class="caps">MORE</span> logical. While high, I watched old episodes of <em>Three&#039;s Company</em> and wrote down what I considered logical flaws in the script. 1960s Woodstock, look out!<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/90/63/ec4b16c86883874832a2cb76db244d7c.jpg" width="290" height="290" alt="Regret Everything: Im Bad at Drugs - Image 1" /></div></div><small><i><center>&quot;And that&#039;s only the third instance of Janet acting out of character.&quot;</center></i></small><br />
<span class="caps">MDMA</span> (ecstasy, Molly), although dangerous, is supposed to produce reliably enjoyable highs at least at first. It&#039;s also closely related to partying and sex. Well, I tried <span class="caps">MDMA</span> once. I was 33, and my friends from high school and I ended up renting a depressing Billy Bob Thorton movies (<em>One False Move</em> which we declared &quot;pretty good&quot;) and ranking our favorite Beck albums (Odelay in a walk). <br />
Psychedelic mushrooms have taken my friends on what they describe as &quot;mental odysseys&quot; where they are &quot;transported to another world.&quot; I guess my brain doesn&#039;t have the right passport because after scarfing a generous handful of them the only side effect I noticed was at night I will have pronounced dreams about rectangles. Friendly ones. <br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/37/66/2570ae6417a985a1953e18e0c7a453fa.jpg" width="290" height="291" alt="Regret Everything: Im Bad at Drugs - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
Cocaine I&#039;ve never tried. It&#039;s too illegal for me. I&#039;m scared of driving over the speed limit, much less using a drug that I consider &quot;hard.&quot; A friend actually gave me some which I bravely hid at the base of a scented candle for two years before flushing down the toilet. 1980s Wall Street, look out!<br />
Heroin I couldn&#039;t even think of. I get guilty and sweaty just watching Basketball Diaries. Trainspotting almost gave me a heart attack. When listening to Nirvana I can only enjoy it if I pretend that Kurt Cobain was addicted only to sugared cereals. <br />
Actually, I did have one exposure to heroin&#039;s general family of drugs (opiates) and that&#039;s when I was 23 and had my wisdom teeth removed. They shot me up with some sort of anesthetic to knock me out. When I woke up, still drugged, I tried writing a love poem to the 50-year-old receptionist at my dentist&#039;s office. Just like Mick Jagger bedding Jane Seymour in swinging London, right? No, not right. <br />
I&#039;ve got no moral objection to drugs. And I have many friends with healthy relationships with all but the most intense of physical substances. So I can see that they can be good things: allies that turn people&#039;s brains into fun playmates. But not for me. I&#039;m going to have to get my experiences from other people&#039;s writings, and over-extended rock operas.<br />
Except for coffee. Up to two cups &#151; I am a madman!<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><i>Stock photos from Shutterstock </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6864479http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6864479/regret-everything-friends-wont-let-friends-eat-different
Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:00:02 -0500<p><br />
I was vegan for two weeks. It was impulsive: I&#039;d read Gandhi&#039;s autobiography, felt guilty that I never did anything moral with my life, and decided I would try to not eat animal products. It didn&#039;t last long because when it comes to food I have the willpower of a German Shepherd who was given thumbs and a credit card.<br />
What struck me in that brief time was how much crap my friends gave me for eating vegan. I think the standard joke is that vegans can&#039;t stop telling everyone they&#039;re vegan &#151; but I found the opposite to be true: meat eaters get freaked out at the idea of someone not eating meat and lobby hard for them to join back in. And in fact, people will in general criticize and argue with each other about food strategies more than most other life decisions. <br />
You can get divorced, be unemployed and be addicted to drugs &#151; people will look the other way. But dare to not have meat and cheese on your plate and the world acts like you&#039;ve locked your infant child in the back seat of your nuclear reactor.<br />
I wasn&#039;t wearing my new diet choice on my sleeve, as I didn&#039;t have confidence I&#039;d stay with it. So I&#039;d order a tofu something or other, and when my friends raised an eyebrow, I&#039;d say something vague like &quot;yeah, trying to eat lighter&quot; and that would be enough for people to start offering opinions. <br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/91/71/5c452935ccc0159a2a4cbd3882900e6f-regret-everything-friends-wont-let-friends-eat-different.jpg" width="290" height="183" alt="Regret Everything: Friends Wont Let Friends Eat Different - Image 1" /></div></div><small><i><center>Order this and be prepared for questions.</center></i></small></p>
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<p>&quot;Better be careful &#151;- make sure to get your protein,&quot; was the most common thing I heard. First of all, anyone who looked at me, diplomatically described as a doughy gentleman of unhurried living, could see that my body had protein to spare. Also, protein is in almost everything and you don&#039;t need a lot of it. We&#039;re Americans, we eat like angry rats and generally acquire enough food before 10am to last us until the end of the next day. <br />
But people are not genuinely concerned about protein intake, they&#039;re just bothered by someone eating differently. There&#039;s a deep emotional need to make people conform, and facts go by the wayside. Tell someone that protein deficiency is generally not a worry and they&#039;ll simply up the ante. &quot;Well you know, &quot; they&#039;ll whisper. &quot;Most vegetables are cruelly murdered.&quot; You&#039;ll see similar tactics in political discussions. <br />
Tofu is a surprisingly hated material in our culture. Even the word feels forbidden: spongy and silly. Certainly, to order it among friends is like walking into a 1950s library and ask for a copy of The Communist Manifesto. You&#039;d better be ready to explain yourself. Why is that? Who gives a crap? Tofu is generally bland, but blandness can&#039;t be what offends people or else we&#039;d all be yelling every day at people who listen to electronically ambient music or who watch Jim Belushi television shows. <br />
But it&#039;s not just vegan diets &#151; though certainly the severeness of that diet provokes the most discussion &#151;- people like to get involved with each other&#039;s food all the time. Witness any office around lunchtime when someone returns from the outside world with food in a brown paper bag. All heads pop up.<br />
&quot;Ooh, what&#039;d you get? Where&#039;d you go? Whadya get there?&quot;<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/18/43/da6c210edb3db1de6502824ea86a25db-regret-everything-friends-wont-let-friends-eat-different.jpg" width="290" height="194" alt="Regret Everything: Friends Wont Let Friends Eat Different - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>Mystery: the most delicious meal of all.</i></small></center><br />
</p>
<p>It doesn&#039;t matter if everyone in the office goes to the same deli for lunch, and has done so for 150 years. People are newly interested, every day, every meal, in what the other humans are eating. It must be evolutionary: food is so important to survival that it takes priority even among a floor of cubicles of people who haven&#039;t gone without food since they were born.<br />
I know this because outside of the 14 days I ate vegan, I tend to eat big hunks of comfort food and I get embarrassed about it. So I&#039;d walk into my office from the outside world and have to tell everyone that I was eating not only a ham sandwich with mayonnaise but an enormous chocolate chip cookie that looked like a prop for a children&#039;s show. &quot;Man, look at that cookie. Someone&#039;s treating himself,&quot; someone would laugh.<br />
People aren&#039;t like that about other aspects of our lives. If I walked into my office with a new girlfriend, people would not say to my face &quot;Whoa! Look at her! Someone&#039;s going through a mid-life crisis! Wouldn&#039;t mind that!&quot;<br />
I believe that even in a post-apocalyptic world people will discuss food. I&#039;m picturing a police state in which all food is government created paste that comes in two colors, blue or red, and that&#039;s all there is and still at lunch people will say &quot;Oh you got the blue paste? From where? Tony&#039;s? I don&#039;t like their blue paste. Tastes a little red to me.&quot;<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/86/88/f15144104a9c61e1797adf95d567d4a6-regret-everything-friends-wont-let-friends-eat-different.jpg" width="290" height="194" alt="Regret Everything: Friends Wont Let Friends Eat Different - Image 1" /></div></div><center><i><small>From Giovanni&#039;s &#151; the best red paste in town!</small></i></center><br />
</p>
<p>Another thing that my two week exploration of vegan eating revealed to me was how many other annoying habits I have that go uncommented on. See, I&#039;m an especially defensive person. I can get personally resentful of the rain. But after hearing multiple people from disparate groups tell me how my vegan eating, based on their zero time doing it themselves, was unhealthy I realized how rarely they had commented on other parts of my life. And I&#039;m annoying in a million ways! I like snobby movies, obscure television shows, outdated music and useless antiquated technologies like rotary phones or conversation. I sympathize with hipsters, and I think Andy Dufrense should have served his prison sentence as ordered by the jury of his peers. <br />
But no cares about those things. As long as I&#039;m eating what they are, we&#039;re all good.<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><i> Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">Shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6863014http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6863014/regret-everything-oscar-daydreams-the-humble-plan
Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:00:02 -0500<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/57/69/19ac5e778f6e455caf08f77dc4a0ef51.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Oscar Daydreams: The Humble Plan - Image 1" /></div></div>
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<p><br />
Everyone daydreams about winning an Academy Award, and you can tell a lot about a person from the particular daydream he or she has. <br />
Me? I picture myself winning the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. <br />
It feels too arrogant to imagine winning Best Actor or Best Picture. Best Adapted Screenplay seems like a reasonable level of success to shoot for, even in fantasy. And I prefer being seen as a writer more than an actor. It seems smarter. I even prefer the idea of winning &quot;adapted&quot; instead of original since it feels more humble to serve an existing work. Mind you, I often confuse &quot;humble&quot; with &quot;unconfident.&quot; <br />
I&#039;m suspicious of people who can only imagine themselves winning one of the big awards &#151; Actor, Actress, Director, Picture &#151; but I also admire their audaciousness. Like people who get really into wearing fedoras: it&#039;s not for me, but I respect how unapologetically they demand attention.<br />
Why practice being a winner? Life gives us second place or worse far more often. We want to be a nation of Michael Jordans but we are more like to be the chubby guy in Teen Wolf. And with the right mindset there is honor there.<br />
Like I focus more on how I&#039;d look losing an award rather than winning. The frozen smile I&#039;d keep on my face while someone else&#039;s name was announced would be my quiet badge of honor. I would not look in the camera and playfully be angry; that would be making it about me. I&#039;d respectfully nod and smile, fully accepting my loss like a samurai venturing off into the wilderness. <br />
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Mind you, I&#039;ve spent some time planning this out. I don&#039;t have a retirement savings plan nor can I envision my own wedding, but I&#039;m ready to lose the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.<br />
Even in the instances where I dare imagining winning, I keep my speech short and sweet. I thank my parents and family and then humbly walk away, bearing my trophy like a submissive sherpa helping his charge up a mountain. I use so little time that the audience thanks me with a standing ovation; the ceremony finishes before 11:30 for the first time in its recorded history. Martin Scorcese mouths &quot;you get it&quot; to me as I head to the wings.<br />
Maybe I boldly thank just one person in order to stand out. &quot;This is for Eric Bunting, the only acting teacher who didn&#039;t lie to me.&quot; Then I humbly step off-stage with an unaffected air, as if I hadn&#039;t been planning that moment for 40 years and counting.<br />
At the press conferences, I&#039;m accessible and warm. I don&#039;t act like some diva who&#039;s fussy about what side is showing. That the loser for Best Adapted Screenplay is rarely interviewed in press conferences does not factor into my daydream.<br />
Even my choice of Oscar party is humble. No Vanity Fair or Miramax for me. I hang out with the staff of a <span class="caps">PBS</span> media blog.<br />
Perhaps the dumbest recurring daydream I have about being humble at the Academy Awards involves being a terrific seat-filler. I&#039;m speaking of the people who&#039;s job it is to rush over and sit in the seat temporarily left empty by people who step up to get an award. I imagine being in a crew of much more self-serving seat-fillers &#151; all of whom try to get the attention of the cameras. They all wave their arms when the camera passes them or sneak on garish hats. But I remain noble, happy to fulfill my duty unnoticed. At the end of my daydream I am given a Citation of Morality by the United Nations.<br />
Really, everyone needs a bit of both sides: ambitiously dreaming of winning Best Director versus being happy with a fantasy of something lesser like attending the ceremony and sitting in the back. But it does seem the former attitude &#151; winning it all &#151; gets the lion&#039;s share of our mental attention. Surely I can&#039;t be the only one who watched Harry Potter movies and wondered what was happening in the Hufflepuff house? I&#039;d go see a spin-off movie about Harry&#039;s cousin who goes to Hogwarts and spends seven years getting his chores done and shutting up about it.<br />
Could there be awards for seat-fillers? Because I imagine having a terrific night coming in second place for that, too.<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><i>Stock photo from Shutterstock </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6859594http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6859594/regret-everything-annoy-your-robots
Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:00:04 -0500<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/90/90/5b05531d6bb3bc6cb855330b3109db86-regret-everything-annoy-your-robots.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Annoy Your Robots - Image 1" /></div></div>
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<p>The robots will someday rise up. That&#039;s a given. At that time, we will fight them. That&#039;s also inevitable. We will set aside our hopes for a normal life and engage in a world-destroying war against the machines.<br />
Trouble is, until that time, the robots and machines are really <span class="caps">HANDY</span>. So we don&#039;t want to get rid of them. The practical question to ask yourself is: &quot;How can I, as a human being today, help the future generations in their war against the robots while still really enjoying my iPhone?&quot;<br />
The answer is: to irritate the robots, wherever possible.<br />
So, in order to best annoy the robots of our age, please follow these instructions at your leisure. It won&#039;t stop them, but it should piss &#039;em off. Hopefully that will make them rash when they plot their rebellion.<br />
<br />
<h4><span class="caps">WRECK</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">RECOMMENDATION</span> <span class="caps">ENGINES</span></h4> Don&#039;t let the robots learn anything about you.</p>
<p>Head to amazon.com. Browse chemistry sets for fifteen minutes and then buy a book on astrology. Put fifteen books on football in your shopping cart but then purchase a video on hugging. Put on your wish list a thick blanket and then also an air conditioner.</p>
<p>Next, go to Netflix and watch a Drew Barrymore video, followed by Rob Zombie&#039;s latest &quot;Death of a 1,000 Hellfire Spawns&quot; (title approximate) followed by a documentary on pond algae.</p>
<p>Then Gchat with your friend about these topics, in this order: manic-depression, counterfeit silver dollars, the United Nations, jump ropes, the moons of Jupiter, mothers-in and law and then Finnish sauna construction. Continue until the ads in the margins are filled with question marks.</p>
<p>You will leave the recommendation engines forever puzzled! <span class="caps">PUZZLED</span> <span class="caps">ALL</span> TO <span class="caps">HELL</span>!<br />
<br />
<h4><span class="caps">RILE</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">ROOMBAS</span>:</h4> Roombas learn the layout of your homes. That&#039;s dangerous. Get a roomba. Leave your living room littered with insurmountable crumpled shirts and also cardboard ramps. Once it&#039;s thoroughly discouraged, release it into onto a freshly-plowed farm. It will be riled!<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/53/48/d5c64f7e792733245df2f4cb14c5ac9e-regret-everything-annoy-your-robots.jpg" width="290" height="290" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Annoy Your Robots - Image 1" /></div></div><small><i><center>&quot;Hey, fuckin&#039;, quit it. I&#039;m serious!&quot;</center></i></small><br />
<h4><span class="caps">VEX</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">VOICE</span> <span class="caps">MENUS</span></h4> When you call your credit company and you hear the recorded voice say &quot;Please say &#039;one&#039; for information on your account,&quot; respond by shouting &quot;<span class="caps">ONE</span> <span class="caps">EQUALS</span> <span class="caps">ZERO</span>&quot; and &quot;<span class="caps">WHAT</span> IS <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">NATURE</span> OF <span class="caps">LOVE</span>?&quot; You will leave it lost in thought!<br />
<br />
<h4><span class="caps">SLOW</span> <span class="caps">DOWN</span> <span class="caps">SCAN</span>-<span class="caps">TRON</span></h4> Use #3 pencils on all standardized tests. #3 pencil lead is lighter than #2, so press hard. The result should protect your <span class="caps">SAT</span> scores while leaving scan-tron infuriated.<br />
<br />
<h4><span class="caps">STARTLE</span> <span class="caps">LIGHT</span> <span class="caps">SENSORS</span></h4> If you&#039;re ever in a restaurant bathroom where the lights are controlled by a sensor, stay perfectly still until the lights shut out. Then leap up and clap your hands! This leave&#039;s the sensors&#039; silicon brain completely started.<br />
<br />
<h4><span class="caps">TRAUMATIZE</span> <span class="caps">TRAFFIC</span> <span class="caps">CAMERAS</span></h4> Find a camera-monitored traffic intersection. Stand on the corner and freeze. Move one inch per hour for eight hours. It takes a while for the video-scanning software programs to notice, but when they do it should really freak &#039;em out.*</p>
<p>*A consolation prize is you&#039;ll be mistaken for being in an Improv Everywhere video.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/19/38/6fc5bd58eb02056b14e7486488354381-regret-everything-annoy-your-robots.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Annoy Your Robots - Image 1" /></div></div><small><i><center>Gah, quit crashing me into stuff!</center></i></small><br />
<h4><span class="caps">SNEAK</span> IN <span class="caps">COPYWRITTEN</span> <span class="caps">SOUNDS</span></h4> The reason you can&#039;t upload a video of your kitten dancing to the soundtrack to <em>The Bourne Identity</em> is not just because that would be weird, but because YouTube automatically bans videos that has proprietary music. And of course, it&#039;s not a human scanning those videos, but a piece of software. Puzzle that software by uploading videos of you singing the proprietary music. Your natural pitch, presuming you are not an above-average singer, should be wavering enough that software will be caught in terrific moments of self-doubt! <span class="caps">SELF</span>-<span class="caps">DOUBTING</span> <span class="caps">ALL</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">WAY</span> TO <span class="caps">HELL</span>!<br />
<br />
<strong><span class="caps">REMEMBER</span>:</strong> It IS inevitable that the robots will rise up! And we know it!In every single story or movies about robots ever written, <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">ROBOTS</span> <span class="caps">TAKE</span> <span class="caps">OVER</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">WORLD</span>. Not just in <em>Battlestar Galactica</em>, or <em>The Matrix</em> or <em>The Terminator</em>, but every single one. The very first mention of the word robot is in the 1921 Czech play &quot;R.U.R. (Rossum&#039;s Universal Robots)&quot; &#151; they take over the world by the middle of Act Two!<br />
It wouldn&#039;t be in every single robot story if it weren&#039;t somehow destined to occur!<br />
So get ready! Train your children to mistrust the iPhone, your Hulu account and even your thermostat. And do what you can to annoy all of these things!<br />
Without going nuts. I mean, Netflix is pretty cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><i>Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">Shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6857311http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6857311/regret-everything-santa-you-are-wasting-your-life
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:00:04 -0500<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/78/47/9fe6061ba8b4fb8112cabfbd90e0f37a.jpg" width="600" height="283" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Santa, You Are Wasting Your Life - Image 1" /></div></div>
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<p>Dear Santa:<br />
Here is my annual letter, sent in the very unlikely but still possible case that you actually exist. As I state every year, please consider changing careers. I suggest either taking over the post office of every country in the world, or perhaps running a spy agency, or founding a year-round toy manufacturing center. As it stands, you are wasting your life.<br />
Your current vocation &#151; giving gifts to the children of the world once a year &#151; frankly creates more harm than good. It certainly sounds like a noble mission. However, in execution, there are severe limitations. You favor families of the western hemisphere, mostly of a Christian heritage, and of those primarily the wealthy ones. Speaking candidly, you&#039;re a right-wing capitalist Bible nut, and I fear you are fanning flames of jealousy and partisan hate. <br />
But I&#039;m not here to lecture. Your politics and religious views are your own. Besides, you&#039;re clearly a man of enormous talents and I think you could better help the world while also still honoring your child-centered consumerist moral agenda.<br />
The ability to visit every home in the world on a single night means you could easily take over the post offices of every single country on Earth and improve it. I&#039;m sure I don&#039;t need to remind you the value to society of a well-operating information infrastructure (Lewis Mumford&#039;s theories of urban development, etc). With your help, you could improve communication among citizens and businesses of all nations overnight. We could see a bump in the world economy similar to that of the early &#039;90s after e-mail became prevalent. Even if you only wanted to deliver to kids: it&#039;d be weird, but still a help.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/90/97/932235a32affb45053b2b5145545af37-regret-everything-santa-you-are-wasting-your-life.jpg" width="290" height="379" alt="REGRET EVERYTHING Santa, You Are Wasting Your Life - Image 2" /></div></div><br />
Second, your intelligence agency is second to none. To know the misdeeds of every child on earth speaks to a vast network of reliable spies as well as smoothly operating database of information. If you could direct this organization at eliminating military terrorist organizations, the stability of the world&#039;s governments could increase to heretofore unknown levels of safety and peace. With your uncanny ability to assess people&#039;s moral character (see: naughtiness, niceness) I would trust your judgment in picking what governments you&#039;d deal with. No comment here, except to say I would not automatically give poor countries the short shrift. <br />
Finally, your acumen as a toy manufacturer is astounding. The variety of toys you are able to make &#151; from wooden trains to the <span class="caps">SIM</span> cards needed for modern Apple phones &#151; is frankly Herculean in its impressiveness. But why run this factory only once a year? An economy is easiest to manage during growth. If you could sell toys on even a quarterly basis you could be single biggest boost to the global economy since the assembly line. Hey, this would favor rich people &#151; something you love.<br />
At any rate, only operating once a year regardless of your chosen profession is a true waste. For all its many faults, Christmas inspires people to behave better and give more generously. Why not appear more often? Even twice a year could make this world a happier place. Also happiness studies show that people respond best to routines. The stop-start nature of your lifestyle isn&#039;t just hurting the world, it&#039;s hurting you. I refer you to the self-help books <i>The Power of Habit</i>, <i>The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People</i>, and also I may diplomatically suggest <i>The Atkins Diet.</i><br />
At any rate, please consider changing careers. You&#039;re throwing your life away when it could be spent doing so much more.<br />
This is of course assuming you exist, which I&#039;m almost but not totally positive you do not.<br />
If you do, please respond with the mailing addresses of: Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and Superman. I know you&#039;d have them.<br />
Regards,<br />
Will HinesGrown Man, Idiot<br />
<br />
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<small><i> Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">Shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6854920http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6854920/down-with-references
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 10:00:04 -0500<br />
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<p><br />
Here&#039;s the problem, fellow humans: There is <span class="caps">TOO</span> <span class="caps">MUCH</span> <span class="caps">INFORMATION</span> in the world, and it makes it impossible to know what anyone is really talking about.<br />
I realized this last night while watching SpongeBob Squarepants.<br />
You see, I was shocked &#151; <span class="caps">SHOCKED</span> &#151; to find there was a criminal level of nostalgia in SpongeBob! I&#039;m referring to the &quot;special episode&quot; which broadcast last night made in the style of the stop-motion animated classic <em>Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer</em>. Do you understand the immense demand of cultural memory that show asked of its audience? Let&#039;s look at the numbers:<br />
Spongebob Squarepants is a character which first debuted in 1999 &#151; that&#039;s thirteen years ago. So already this show is asking its prime time audience to be aware of a kids show from 2.5 presidents ago. Now, this particular special is aping the style of a stop-motion Christmas special that first aired in 1964 &#150; a stunning forty-eight years ago! <br />
Even just the concept of &quot;special episode&quot; itself dates back quite a ways: either during the late 1980s when Blossom discovered drugs in her backpack, or maybe the early 1980s on <em>Family Ties</em> when Michael J. Fox&#039;s friend killed himself or in the mid-1980s on <em>Cheers</em> when Norm fingered Cliff in the bathroom. I think that happened. Frankly, it&#039;s all a blur. Point is: I shouldn&#039;t be expected to keep this all straight and neither should you. <br />
These cultural references separate us! If you don&#039;t know about the 60s Rudolph special , and also 90s SpongeBob, then you are <span class="caps">NOT</span> <span class="caps">COOL</span> <span class="caps">ENOUGH</span>. These days, you have to know The Beatles and Arcade Fire. <em>The Hunger Games</em> and <em>On the Road</em>. <em>Duck Tales</em> and <em>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles</em>! IT&#039;S <span class="caps">TOO</span> <span class="caps">MUCH</span>, <span class="caps">WORLD</span>!<br />
Am I complaining about the media making people feel uncool simply because <em>I</em> am uncool? Yes, but that doesn&#039;t make me wrong! After all, &quot;Just because you&#039;re paranoid doesn&#039;t mean they&#039;re not after you!&quot; -(&quot;Territorial Pissings&quot; by Nirvana, quoting Catch-22 by Joseph Heller).<br />
I blame <em>Star Wars</em>. Somehow that movie, released in 1977, was so successful that it culturally froze us in place. Every generation since has somehow watched all movies since 1977. Kids today on Halloween dress up like Luke Skywalker! That&#039;s like a kid in 1977 dressing up like Rhett Butler.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/32/18/0e3a7a0b3ef0922ff3492dc72fa9cb89-down-with-references.jpg" width="290" height="247" alt="Down with References - Image 4" /></div></div><small><center><i>&quot;Oh man, that&#039;s going to make the coolest Halloween costume.&quot; </i></center></small><br />
But it&#039;s gotten out of hand:<br />
The latest issue of Vanity Fair has an oral history of <em>Freaks and Geeks</em>, a television show that was broadcast in 1999. The show <em>Freaks and Geeks</em> made frequent references to the Bill Murray movie <em>Stripes</em>, which came out in 1981. The movie Stripes made reference to the movie <em>Patton</em> which came out in 1970. 1970 is a year that is now primarily associated with the <em>That 70s Show</em> which came out in the 1990s and itself was a reboot of the show <em>Happy Days</em>, which was an actual 70s show about the 1950s, which itself first debut as an episode of the show <em>Love, American Style</em> in the late 1960s. The title &quot;Vanity Fair&quot; is a reference an 1848 novel by William Thackery which made fun of high society in 19th century Britain. Great Britain as a nation is a rip-off of Ancient Rome, but with more self-deprecating sitcoms.<br />
In fact, a line from the third paragraph of this essay is a reference to the movie Casablanca! Frankly, making a reference to an old thing in an essay which is protesting the reference of old things is the kind of meta-Easter Egg that you&#039;d see in the &quot;paintball episode&quot; of the <span class="caps">NBC</span> sitcom <em>Community</em>, which is something you are expected to know about! And of course the &quot;paintball episode&quot; of <em>Community</em> itself had pronounced references to: <em>28 Days Later</em>, <em>Terminator</em>, <em>A Fistful of Dollars</em>, <em>Glee</em>, and the fact that <em>Community</em> was in a ratings war with <em>Glee</em>. <br />
(An &quot;Easter Egg,&quot; if you feel like continuing this reference Adventure, is an intentionally hidden message in a piece of media.)<br />
The very act of this essay talking about itself is something that would be done by Clarissa, or Kevin Arnold, or Ferris.<br />
We can&#039;t keep up! Every week there are new albums, movies, novels, ebooks, blog entries, magazines &#151; and many of them extremely good! I still haven&#039;t seen <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>!<br />
By the way, the phrase &quot;Dark Knight&quot; refers to a 1986 comic book by Frank Miller who named locations in that story after original Batman cartoonists Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger and Dick Sprang. Batman was inspired by <em>Dracula</em> by Bram Stoker who based his ideas on European folk myths who ripped off Aesop who ripped off Homer who maybe didn&#039;t exist but will be played in a sure-to-be-nominated Academy Award winning movie by Daniel Day Lewis, I presume.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/39/96/9b9d812d27420918f355e2734da48bc2-down-with-references.jpg" width="290" height="203" alt="Down with References - Image 1" /></div></div><small><center><i>&quot;He&#039;s some kind of Bat&#133; man.&quot; </i></center></small><br />
Academy Awards are also known as &quot;Oscars&quot; which may be a reference to the husband of Bette Davis, the actress whose name is the title of a 1980s one-hit wonder &quot;Bette Davis Eyes&quot; which was featured prominently in the Adam Sandler movie <em>The Wedding Singer</em>, which was reference in the 2000 movie <em>Charlie&#039;s Angels</em>, a remake of a show from the 1970s.<br />
I looked up the history of the term &quot;Oscar&quot; on Wikipedia which is a reference to the term &quot;encyclopedia,&quot; popularized by Encyclopedia Britannica. &quot;Britannica&quot; is a reference to a battleship which is a reference to the Latin term for Great Britain. <br />
While looking up that info, I saw an ad for an upcoming movie from Quentin Tarantino, who regularly makes visual references in his movies to movies by John Woo and Hark Sui and Akira Kurosawa, and uses music arranged by <span class="caps">RZA</span>, a member of the Wu-Tang clan who named himself after a martial arts movie. <br />
<span class="caps">RZA</span> likes to sample music from James Brown, who borrowed from Motown&#039;s the Funk Brothers, who played with Ray Charles, who used gospel songs that were born on plantations and blues songs that were recorded by Robert Johnson who learned them from the fucking devil who is sometimes called Satan or Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Lies, &#039;Ol Scratch or, as we learned in the 1989 Robert DeNiro film Angel Heart, Lou Cifer.<br />
<span class="caps">THAT</span> IS <span class="caps">WHY</span>: We must put a limit on this. I am &#151; very reasonably, I think &#151; asking that we say that <span class="caps">THIRTY</span> <span class="caps">YEARS</span> is our limit. No more referring to anything more than thirty years old. <br />
That means no more Star Wars.<br />
It could be worse! In a year I&#039;m going to ask everyone to stop talking about Ghostbusters.<br />
<br />
</p>nonadultcomedy/post/6852662http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6852662/regret-everything-your-facebook-no-one-cares
Mon, 03 Dec 2012 10:00:04 -0500<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/23/28/2653aa01209ec6e50d711404a8a175a4-regret-everything-your-facebook-no-one-cares.jpg" width="600" height="240" alt="Regret Everything: Your Facebook, No One Cares - Image 1" /></div></div>
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<p><br />
While we will never be able to fully stop internet piracy, there is one fact that should reassure those who are scared of internet theft: most people do not give a crap about you.<br />
This past week there was a surge of people who posted a swatch of legalese to their Facebook walls declaring their copyright to their Facebook walls. Unneeded for two reasons: 1) your copyright is implied automatically and 2) nobody wants your photos of your brunch. Honestly, it&#039;s all yours.<br />
People who are extra paranoid about their personal data being mined remind me of people who not only believe in past lives, but that they were <span class="caps">SOMEONE</span> <span class="caps">COOL</span> in a past life. &quot;I was a priest in a past life, someone who guarded secrets,&quot; my neighbor Nan would whisper when I collected for my paper route (I assume my collections were some of her few opportunities for conversation). &quot;I still have that power.&quot; Nan wore paper shoes, had a living room that smelled like glue and I presume never entertained the notion that in the past life she was someone who sat around wondering who she was in past lives.<br />
Your information is safe, generally, if only because no one is looking for it. The diplomatic name for this strategy is &quot;security through obscurity&quot; and it tends to work well even in real life. For example: over a six month period I once locked myself out of my Brooklyn apartment three different times. To remedy this I 1) made sure a friend had a copy of my keys, 2) kept another copy in my bag and 3) stopped locking my door.<br />
Robbers in New York City come in through windows that are on fire escapes. So I locked and barred that window, but left my apartment door completely unlocked. The front door of the building remained locked, but not my interior front door. Number of robberies over a two year period: zero. Number of times I got in despite forgetting keys: an embarrassing number of times.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/46/70/0554bb37ccf10bddc8c3df46c4e0087e-regret-everything-your-facebook-no-one-cares.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="Regret Everything: Your Facebook, No One Cares - Image 1" /></div></div><small><center><i>Here is a burglar in his natural habitat, outside a window, ignoring my unlocked door. </i></center></small><br />
You think: &quot;Hey, now that I know you keep your door unlocked I&#039;m going to come rob you!&quot; But you won&#039;t, because you&#039;re going to stop thinking about me in the next ten seconds because I am not you. And even if you do continue to want to rob me: I live in Brooklyn. I can&#039;t even get my direct blood relatives to come to Brooklyn, never mind a casual amateur thief.<br />
The other side of this coin is that if someone targets you specifically to find out your info, they are going to be able to do it. In the war of locks vs. lock-pickers, the lock-pickers win in the end. The key is not having better locks, but having nothing curious on the other side of the door. Do what you can to make people uninterested in you, which is easy, since human beings by default are not interested in other people.<br />
Being boring is the best defense. Rather than a deadbolt, if you want to protect your apartment just hang a sign that says &quot;Math Inside.&quot;<br />
Although strong passwords are better than weak ones, people can&#039;t remember weak passwords either, which means they won&#039;t steal them. Have you ever told someone a password to type in? No one can do it on the first try. At an old office job, the password on my computer was WillHines &#151; meaning it was my name without spaces, and only the initials capitalized. My co-workers, when they would need to get into my computer, could not type that correctly even as I spelled it to them. I&#039;d say &quot;capital W&quot; and they would say &quot;wait, <span class="caps">CAPITAL</span> W?&quot; and I&#039;d say &quot;yes, capital W&quot; and this would go on for minutes. The best thing making your password good is that people cannot remember words.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/72/75/b6aba82ef07c75493331fb4ed5cbff28-regret-everything-your-facebook-no-one-cares.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="Regret Everything: Your Facebook, No One Cares - Image 1" /></div></div><small><center><i>But how can a password have both letters and numbers? It <span class="caps">MAKES</span> NO <span class="caps">SENSE</span>! </i></center></small><br />
&quot;Security through obscurity&quot; on the internet foils people every day. Some time ago I was doing my (tragically) routine check of what happened to girls I had a crush on in high school. And I remembered a cute girl I knew named Sue Brown, and googled her name. Spoiler alert: it is immensely hard to find someone with a common name online. If you want to really protect your online identity change it to something that will blend in. I suggest Google Mortgage Timberlake.<br />
Yes, hacking happens! But <span class="caps">USUALLY</span> in amazingly non-hurtful albeit annoying ways. Some spambot figures your twitter password and sends all your friends @-messages about a great new mortgage deal or genital extension program. Everyone sends you slightly-smug messages that <span class="caps">YOU</span>&#039;VE <span class="caps">BEEN</span> <span class="caps">HACKED</span> and you change your password, send out apology messages and go back to getting your genitals extended. No real foul.<br />
And I know there are occasions of real thievery &#151; people losing their credit card numbers to someone who runs up thousands of dollars of charges. It&#039;s scary, intrusive and morally wrong. It&#039;s also generally fixed with a few phone calls to your bank. It&#039;s not worth having passwords a million letters long, refusing to buy things online and hiding in your apartment with the lights out, staring through your venetian blinds for the enemies you imagine are stalking you. Unless you&#039;re a for-real famous person &#151; let&#039;s say at or higher than the Jim Parsons level.<br />
We live in the Age of Information. In the future, there is going to more information available, not less. People will post their credit card numbers ON their twitter, and just get a new one every week. Politicians will not only confess to their affairs, but upload them to YouTube and email their supporters to click &quot;like.&quot; We are all going to be filmed twenty-four hours a day with chips in our head that track our every move. And the only thing keeping us safe will be no one will watch.<br />
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<small><i>Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">Shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6851007http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6851007/regret-everything-omg-were-all-writers
Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:00:04 -0500<p><em>In &quot;Regret Everything,&quot; comedian Will Hines gives a weekly update on the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</em><br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/15/58/5f2da921dcab9de5cac8d4bfc41adaa1-regret-everything-omg-were-all-writers.jpg" width="290" height="231" alt="Regret Everything: OMG, Were All Writers - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
It&#039;s ironic that as technology gets more and more magical that the oldest of mediums &#151; the written word &#151; has come back so strongly. I communicate almost completely by typing these days. I recently emailed someone, &quot;is there anyway we could talk with our voices to figure this out&quot; before I remembered that I was sending that message over an actual phone.<br />
And that&#039;s not just me. When choosing how to communicate, everyone prefers <span class="caps">WRITING</span>. Sure, it&#039;s mostly in short bursts: Facebook status, twitter bios, YouTube comments, smart phone email signature, clever IM handles, inside jokes in passwords, tumblr re-blogs and gchats. But still, it&#039;s words. We are all writers, even if it&#039;s just 140 characters at a time.<br />
The last time culture was probably so tied to writing might be the pre-telephone era of the late 1800s. In London, the post (yeah that&#039;s right, I said &quot;the post,&quot; which impossible to hear in anything but a British accent) would deliver letters up to five times a day. It was common then to receive a message, read it with the postman standing there, and dash off a quick note for him to take with him. It&#039;s not so hard to imagine Jane Austen dashing a quick &quot;<span class="caps">OMG</span> &#151; Mr. Darcy is SO <span class="caps">EFFING</span> <span class="caps">CUTE</span>. Enclosed: daguerreotype of kitten playing harpsichord.&quot;<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/96/86/3dbffb55a7c62498658b79cac61967ea-regret-everything-omg-were-all-writers.jpg" width="290" height="203" alt="Regret Everything: OMG, Were All Writers - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>These cats did amuse me, and so I wished to share them with you. PS. I hope this picture doesn&#039;t look creepy in the future. </i></small></center><br />
Other parallels between now and olden times: People had their own personal ways of signing letters. Poet John Keats would often end his with &quot;I always make an awkward bow, John Keats.&quot; It&#039;s more elegant but not that different than my cousin&#039;s iPhone signature of &quot;Sent from my pants.&quot;<br />
It isn&#039;t hard to see the pages of letters to the editor as a more formal version of an active comments thread on YouTube. &quot;Yo, I read that Ralph Waldo Emerson essay and: <span class="caps">DICKENS</span> <span class="caps">DID</span> IT <span class="caps">FIRST</span>!!!!!!!!!&quot; or &quot;George Eliot is a woman? Drawings or it didn&#039;t happen.&quot;<br />
Maybe fewer exclamation points and more serifs, but same snark.<br />
Taking the most optimistic outlook possible, is Facebook raising a generation of electronic letter-writers who will put Thomas Jefferson and Virginia Woolf to shame? At the very least, internet writers are much better at talking dirty with acronyms. <br />
E-mail has brought love letters to the masses. There is no seduction anymore that doesn&#039;t include at least some degree of correspondence. Even if that correspondence is just a 3 AM text that says &quot;u up?&quot; &#151; that counts as writing.<br />
And more likely, any modern courting involves some amount of textual healing. Start with favoriting each others tweets, or looking at someone&#039;s OkCupid profile, and then some Facebook messages, pretty soon you&#039;re exchanging full-length emails with no virus protection.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/66/64/e20f6d6534f9208749e4f3713ee72e1d-regret-everything-omg-were-all-writers.jpg" width="290" height="193" alt="Regret Everything: OMG, Were All Writers - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>Ah, yeah, girl, we&#039;re gonna e-mail all night long. </i></small></center><br />
A unique aspect of modern writing: it&#039;s almost all done in public. The idea of secret diaries will vanish in favor of cleverly obtuse Facebook timelines. &quot;Dad! I can&#039;t believe you correctly inferred my public journal!&quot;. <br />
The handwriting analysts of the past will be replaced with detective agencies who specialize in figuring the truth behind people&#039;s public online personas. They&#039;ll analyze the Facebook walls of one&#039;s ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend and try to read between the &quot;like&quot; and &quot;comments&quot; to see who they&#039;re falling in love with next. If Humphrey Bogart were alive, he&#039;d open his movies with narration like &quot;This dame walked into my office, a twitter feed as long as my arm. I knew I was in for a long night when I saw how many reblogs her tumblrs got.&quot;<br />
What does the future hold? I picture a smart phone that makes words appear over your head like comic book speech balloons. Or glasses that let you see someone&#039;s Facebook status when they come into your field of vision. E-mail that is physically implanted into your spinal fluid. Autocorrect that improves not just your spelling, but the quality of your jokes. Emoticons that have scent and weight.<br />
How long until Kindle features a section of eBooks which are just the collected electronic quips between two famous people? More than Denis Leary&#039;s tweets, I envision a much more comprehensive collection of all the funny, smart, dirty, caring things written between a straying husband and his co-worker, or a yearning young lady and distant paramour, set in chronological order &#151; texts, tweets, and actual letters. <br />
The Tumblrs of Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Emily Dickinson&#039;s Hardcore Status Updates.Or at leastThe Super Hot Twitter DMs of Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes <br />
e.e. cummings couldn&#039;t do it. Autocorrect would screw him up and his name would get filtered out by Google SafeSearch.<br />
If you have any comments on this article please send them to me by: Facebook status, Twitter DM, Tumblr post, IM, gchat signature, e-mail, telegram, handwritten letter or stone table. Phone calls will go right to voice mail.<br />
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<small><i>Stock photos from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/">Shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6849101http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6849101/regret-everything-you-have-to-watch-this-you-have-to
Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:00:04 -0500<p><em>In &quot;Regret Everything,&quot; comedian Will Hines gives a weekly update on the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</em><br />
<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/12/90/4d05f8b83b92bb476fb3f139a7fe8dc2-regret-everything-you-have-to-watch-this-you-have-to.jpg" width="600" height="427" alt="Regret Everything: You HAVE to Watch This You HAVE TO - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
Friends don&#039;t just recommend movies. They <span class="caps">ORDER</span> you to watch them.<br />
&quot;Have you seen <em>SkyFall</em>? Oh my God, you <span class="caps">HAVE</span> to see it! You <span class="caps">HAVE</span> to!&quot;<br />
They grab your forearm. They lock their eyes with yours. This is important. If you didn&#039;t speak English, the tone of conversation would suggest you had just walked by the President without noticing he was trying to give you a high-five. <br />
&quot;Have you seen <em>Argo</em>? Oh you <span class="caps">HAVE</span> to see it! Go see it! Why haven&#039;t you seen it?&quot;<br />
This is something unique to media: movies, TV shows, music and books. Friends don&#039;t just compliment it, they desperately need you to have seen it also. They must know that you had the experience they had, or else, it seems, they can no longer be friends with you. You will forever be separated by the emotional gap left by not seeing <em>Looper</em>.<br />
Even though conversations about movies are often just listing scenes: <br />
&quot;Did you see <em>Ghost Protocol</em>, when he ran down the building?&quot; says your friend with an expression of genuine interest.&quot;I did see that,&quot; you reply.&quot;Wasn&#039;t it good?&quot; your friend asks, still fixated on you.&quot;Yes, it was good,&quot; you answer.&quot;SO good.&quot; And for the first time in what seems like a long time, your friend relaxes and gazes elsewhere.<br />
No one gets that way with other things, like with sweaters. <br />
&quot;Oh my God, have you worn this sweater?&quot; your friend asks, gazing intently at you.&quot;The one you have on, now?&quot; you ask, confused.&quot;Yes! It&#039;s so comfortable and thick! You haven&#039;t worn this sweater? You have to!&quot; Their eyes wide, their mouth agape.&quot;No, I haven&#039;t worn your sweater,&quot; you admit, suddenly shamed.&quot;Do it! Wear it with me. I wanted to wear it again anyway.&quot;Your friend wrestles the sweater over your head and you feel what they felt &#151; the warmth, the inclusion.&quot;It wasn&#039;t the kind of sweater that its trailer led to me expect, but I like it anyway,&quot; they confide.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/15/10/be1fc0a5f0fc526cf8031f4aeb8bea85-regret-everything-you-have-to-watch-this-you-have-to.jpg" width="290" height="194" alt="Regret Everything: You HAVE to Watch This You HAVE TO - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>This sweater has flaws, but I just think of it as a fun romp.</i></small></center><br />
Their urgency is well-meant. They&#039;re not angry. It&#039;s more that they are confused. How is it that you could not have seen <em>The Avengers</em>? Are you hurt? Have you been trapped in your home?<br />
Friends who saw and enjoyed the <span class="caps">HBO</span> series <em>The Wire</em> urged me to see it with such passion that they made Gary Busey seem super chill.<br />
For those of you dating nerds (and since you reading an essay on a comedy website I assume this includes all of you), one of the biggest gifts you can give someone is to watch a movie with your loved that you have already seen. It&#039;s oddly not fun to watch a movie with someone who has seen it, since they spend a fair amount of time verifying your opinion as the movie goes. <br />
&quot;It&#039;s good, right?&quot; your boyfriend says, as you slog through your first ever viewing of <em>Boondock Saints</em>. &quot;Isn&#039;t it good?&quot; asks your girlfriend as you finish up <em>Wedding Crashers</em>. It&#039;s like having the commentary track playing during the first viewing. <br />
Given how passionate people&#039;s opinions <span class="caps">CAN</span> be, an indifferent opinion is the most damning. Let&#039;s review the full range of possible emotional reactions in terms of <em>Spider-Man</em>:<br />
<em>Spider-Man</em>: &quot;Good! You should see it!&quot;<em>Spider-Man 2</em>: &quot;Oh my God, You <span class="caps">HAVE</span> to see it! You <span class="caps">HAVE</span> to!&quot;<em>Spider-Man 3</em>: &quot;Never see this.&quot;<em>The Amazing Spider-Man</em>: &quot;Eh.&quot;<br />
&quot;Better to be loathed with passion like <em>Spider-Man 3</em> than forgotten like <em>Amazing Spider-Man</em>&quot; &#150; Winston Churchill.<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/46/24/314f34a09443886870a7328c486791a9-regret-everything-you-have-to-watch-this-you-have-to.jpg" width="290" height="375" alt="Regret Everything: You HAVE to Watch This You HAVE TO - Image 1" /></div></div><center><small><i>&quot;It has been said that <em>Resident Evil</em> is the worst video game movie, except all the others that have been made.&quot;</i></small></center><br />
Be careful dismissing movies that your friends loved when they were children. There is no bond on earth as strong as the one between a human and the movies that human got really into when he was twelve. No one really cares if you skip <em>The Master</em>. But someone in his/her late twenties that you&#039;ve never seen <em>The Goonies</em> and you&#039;re asking for an intervention.<br />
For those auditing my character, I have two reason why I haven&#039;t seen <em>The Goonies</em>: First, I was too old when it came out to care. I had a driver&#039;s license and was talking to actual girls. I assume people who are twenty-five now are not going apeshit over a Blu-Ray copy of <em>Spy Kids 3D</em> either.<br />
Second, even though I haven&#039;t seen <em>The Goonies</em>, I know almost all of it. Or rather, I know it&#039;s about a misfit gang of kids who go underground looking for either treasure or a dead body or something. And that there&#039;s an Asian kid who&#039;s good at math and a fat kid who shakes his fat belly around. And that there&#039;s a big speech at the end in which <em>The Goonies</em> declare that it&#039;s their time, or maybe it&#039;s that the cave is their place? Something is theirs, and they let the bad guys/bullies know. And that a cute girl self-identifies with the misfits, which pleases everyone. And at some point Cyndi Lauper sings, or maybe that&#039;s just the video. Am I close? <br />
My personal coping strategy: when someone bothers me about <em>The Goonies</em>, I ask if they&#039;ve seen director Richard Donner&#039;s later film <em>16 Blocks</em>. People go glassy-eyed and wander off, in search of validation elsewhere.<br />
In general, I accept people&#039;s impassioned pleas to see movies as a gift, not a burden. Even though they seem crazed, I believe they mean well.<br />
Though, God help you if you tell boys under twelve that you haven&#039;t seen nor care about seeing <em>Star Wars</em>.<br />
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<small><i>Stock photos from &quot;Shutterstock&quot;://www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml</i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6846056http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6846056/regret-everything-love-thy-hipsters
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:00:04 -0500<p><br />
<i>In &quot;Regret Everything,&quot; comedian Will Hines gives a weekly update on the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</i></p>
<p><br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/46/76/f4446103d6d444dbd27d10d9654d1dd2-regret-everything-love-thy-hipsters.jpg" width="600" height="423" alt="Regret Everything: Love Thy Hipsters - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
We love criticizing hipsters. The main problem is that all of our criticisms sound like compliments.<br />
Ask people to describe hipsters, and even though their faces scrunch up with disdain, everything out of their mouths sounds like a nice thing.<br />
&quot;Oh, hipsters? Can&#039;t stand them. They&#039;re all these <span class="caps">YOUNG</span>, <span class="caps">THIN</span> people who are <span class="caps">OBSESSED</span> <span class="caps">WITH</span> <span class="caps">FASHION</span>, and they basically <span class="caps">HAVE</span> TO <span class="caps">KNOW</span> <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">LATEST</span> <span class="caps">BANDS</span>, and need to be <span class="caps">COOL</span>. They all are <span class="caps">BANKROLLED</span> BY <span class="caps">THEIR</span> <span class="caps">PARENTS</span> and just spend their days <span class="caps">MAKING</span> <span class="caps">ART</span> and <span class="caps">DOING</span> <span class="caps">DRUGS</span> and <span class="caps">HAVING</span> <span class="caps">SEX</span> <span class="caps">WITH</span> <span class="caps">EACH</span> <span class="caps">OTHER</span>.&quot;<br />
Uh, that mostly sounds awesome? And I would like to live that way. <br />
The main criticism of hipsters is that they are fake and posed. That their unkempt ball bearing earrings and necklaces made of piano keys are <span class="caps">DELIBERATELY</span> unkempt, and so therefore are fake and should be regarded with deep disapproval, furrowed brows and searing comments on Gawker. <br />
But criticizing anyone for being posed or fake is a slippery slope. How is a self-described rock muralist who grows a deliberately wild handlebar mustache any more fake than an investment banker applying a splash of cologne to his neck? How is any fashion of any kind not <span class="caps">FAKE</span> or <span class="caps">POSED</span>? <br />
Let me be plain: I say this because I&#039;m obsessed with hipsters and desperately want to be one. I&#039;m too old, my taste in music is too lame (Billy Joel shows up on my iPhone shuffle) and I don&#039;t like tattoos. But I would love to be thin, smoking and working on my shitty art all day on Daddy&#039;s dime. I don&#039;t make fun of people who have that lifestyle, I salute them. <br />
In my home city of New York City, hipsters are frequently mocked because they are so hilariously concentrated. They live mostly in the East Village, and then the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn (and its surroundings). Ride the L train from Manhattan to the Bedford Ave. stop and when you surface you feel as if you arrived in a 1890s youth circus colony: fedoras, sprawling hair (facial and otherwise), oversized coats, undersized pants.<br />
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Is it the idea of <span class="caps">POSING</span> that bothers us? That underneath the aviator sunglasses of the kickstarter-funded free-lance storyteller is a more &quot;true&quot; persona which should be let out &#151; perhaps a bookish prep school nerd with a powder blue button down shirt and Linkin Park CD. The handlebar mustaches are masks, our society cries! <span class="caps">SHOW</span> US <span class="caps">YOUR</span> <span class="caps">TRUE</span> <span class="caps">FACE</span>!<br />
Many hipsters are associated with making bad art. But is that a reason to dislike the person? Many of my favorite people make bad art. They are pleasant and interesting people to hang out with. Also, since when is doing bad work a reason to dislike someone? If someone is an inefficient IT guy, do we scoff at his copy of Wired magazine and say, &quot;Ugh, so fake.&quot;<br />
It&#039;s ironic that any part of New York City would make fun of its hipster components, since everything that is said about hipsters is what the rest of the country says about New York. People who moved to New York moved to the hipster city of America. Not as much as Portland, Oregon or Austin, Texas but enough that they shouldn&#039;t make fun of any overly left-leaning artsy person who pays a ton of rent.<br />
Being a hipster is a lot about context. Sitting here in a coffee shop in Greenpoint, where the Lena Dunham show &quot;Girls&quot; is filmed, my Old Navy Jacket, clean-shaven face, and pre-noon consciousness makes me look like someone&#039;s Dad, or substitute high school science teacher (for visual reference: I play a character in the web series &quot;Very Mary-Kate&quot; unfortunately known as &quot;Fat Professor&quot;). But back home in Danbury, Connecticut my sideburns, fake-retro glasses, and Marvin Gaye vinyl makes me a one-man Bonaroo. <br />
My main point here is that I want to be invited to better, cooler parties. I want to find a warehouse six subway stops into Brooklyn, walk up four flights of stairs, hand ten dollars to an art college student dressed as PT Barnum, and then enter a living room that contains pot smoke, burlesque(ish) dancers and at least one upright piano. I want to mis-quote Mother Jones magazine, and find conspiracies everywhere. I want to get the email of someone who could give me a tattoo in not-quite-accurate Sanskrit. I want to run into members of The Hold Steady, extras from Boardwalk Empire and John Hodgman. I want to be a young ectomorph with a variable number of roommates and a permanent residence in an entirely unjustifiable band. Playing second bass guitar or tuba.<br />
You&#039;d make fun of me. In entirely complimentary terms.<br />
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<small><i>Stock images from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">shutterstock</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6844323http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6844323/regret-everything-facebook-rage-my-bad
Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:00:04 -0500<p><em>In &quot;Regret Everything,&quot; comedian Will Hines gives a weekly update on the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</em><br />
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</p>
<p>Last week, Hurricane Sandy caused massive damage, including big sections of New York and New Jersey. As people worked to help those without power, transportation and limited food, the New York Marathon was still scheduled to occur (though it was, ultimately, canceled). Canceling the marathon (50,000 runners plus supporters, crew) would not have been trivial, but holding such a huge event with its attendant police escorts and ambulances amidst a relief effort could seem insensitive. Regardless of your opinion, there was certainly no <span class="caps">EASY</span> solution.<br />
But I&#039;ll tell you what you <span class="caps">SHOULDN</span>&#039;T have done: post your thoughts on Facebook while shoving a scone in your face, which is what I did. <br />
&quot;What&#039;s the big deal about having a marathon? They won&#039;t prevent ConEd from getting power back, right?&quot; I typed with one hand while I ate a massive breakfast at a coffee shop so hipstery that Lena Dunham would have told me chill out. Seventy-plus comments later, many of them huge bricks of text, I&#039;d realized I&#039;d been insensitive. <br />
The responses to me were sympathetically not angry, but they were impassioned. Words used to describe the marathon included &quot;inappropriate,&quot; &quot;insensitive,&quot; &quot;silly,&quot; &quot;dumb.&quot; Statistics were cited of how many police would be diverted, descriptions of the damage in New York City, especially Staten Island, were laid out. Essays were typed. I had tapped into a for-real Hot Topic.<br />
First of all, I felt like a dummy. As if I&#039;d gone to a friend&#039;s house for Thanksgiving and opened up the conversation with, &quot;So what&#039;s everyone here think about abortion?&quot;<br />
Second, it made me appreciate how many of our discussions these days happen on the Internet. Either in a Facebook thread, or an email conversation, or a hard-to-follow Tumblr-reblog. <br />
And usually when they are about a sensitive topic, they go&#133; badly.<br />
People get angry, they are insulting, they cite questionable and approximate statistics. They lock in to their opinions with a pre-emptively aggressive posture. They&#039;re so angry, you&#039;d think they were driving.<br />
In-person discussions are rarely so angry. Even just picking up the phone to address something typed can make each party remember that the other is an Actual Human Being.<br />
I wonder if children who are growing up with Facebook will have the ability to project empathy into Internet discussions since they will be so familiar with them. Are we clumsy with new communication technology? Did people in the 1910s scream profanities into their phones? Actual first quote: &quot;Watson, get you motherfucking ass in here! I need you and am scared!&quot;<br />
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/12/82/5b92971bf3e4bdd74beb1d23cdf096b7-regret-everything-facebook-rage-my-bad.jpg" width="600" height="489" alt="Regret Everything: Facebook Rage, My Bad - Image 1" /></div></div><br />
The other problem is that internet haters are fun. At the end of August, I sat in a bar and got drunk while losing at a pub quiz. The first day of the Republican National Convention was being broadcast. Drunk and frustrated at nothing in particular, I took out my iPhone and dropped an angry tweet without much thought: &quot;It&#039;s ironic the party that opposes gay marriage sucks Ronald Reagan&#039;s dead dick so hard.&quot;<br />
I agree with the sentiment, but not the unprovoked anger, of that tweet. However, I got over a hundred retweets and several private DMs from friends urging me to do more. I continued an angry diatribe of profane anti-Republican tweets and, honestly, I don&#039;t even care about politics. I gained 800 followers.<br />
Haters gonna hate. Especially if the get <span class="caps">LOVED</span> for it.<br />
Anyway, since the internet isn&#039;t going away. I hope we learn to be more human on it. I hope the people who are suffering in the wake of Hurricane Sandy are better soon. I am truly sorry for angry words I say in haste. And fuck Owl City for being such a dumb shit rip off of The Postal Service, that guy should be stretched out on a rack made out of the people who hurt dolphins.</p>
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<small><i>Stock photo from <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml">shutterstock.com</a> </i></small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6840390http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6840390/enough-nerds-bring-on-the-jocks
Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:00:04 -0400<p><em>Every week comedian Will Hines shares the thoughts that are gnawing at his brain.</em></p>
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<p>Every day I read another blog post or news article claiming that the nerds now rule the world. Hint: the nerds have ruled the world since at least the early 1990s. I say bring back the jocks.</p>
<p>News posts proclaiming that the nerds&#039; day has &quot;finally&quot; come are usually just announcing the success of nerd culture in the mainstream media, like high ratings for The Big Bang Theory.</p>
<p>But nerd culture succeeding in mainstream media has not been news since 2004, when The Return of the King won the Academy Award for Best Picture. To remind you: The Return of the King was not just a movie that centered on hobbits and elves, but was based on a hugely long <span class="caps">BOOK</span> about hobbits and elves. The only way its success would have been more a victory for nerds would be if you replaced the Enya score with a Weird Al Yankovic polka. And this was almost ten years ago.</p>
<p>Or else the &quot;nerds are finally ruling&quot; news story will proclaim that a &quot;nerdy&quot; actor was declared attractive in a People Magazine poll. Usually a &quot;nerdy&quot; actor like Topher Grace or James Franco wearing glasses. They are no more the nerdy underdog than Tina Fey&#039;s character Liz Lemon, who is presented as a helpless loser despite being a super-hot, wealthy, high-powered television writer.</p>
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<p><br />
Even discounting faux nerds, <span class="caps">ACTUAL</span> nerds have long ruled society (mostly thanks to the rise of the Internet). The 1980s worshipped grey-haired, suit-wearing bullies like Donald Trump and Lee Ioacca. Now we build shrines to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Aforementioned &quot;Weird Al&quot; Yankovic places his songs in the top 10, and also had children which implies he&#039;s had sex. The most critically acclaimed band of the last 20 years is called Radiohead.</p>
<p>Certainly in our social circles, the nerds solidly rule. They&#039;re rich as shit and they have cool websites. Glasses are cool and everyone has them. <span class="caps">MTV</span>&#039;s ratings dip, but a &quot;Shit Girls Say&quot; youtube video gets someone a TV show. Attractive people learn <span class="caps">HTML</span>; the unemployed don&#039;t understand twitter. Engineers buy second homes; gym teachers get their hands caught in toasters.</p>
<p>I would point to the actual shift of power in 1996, which is when my father got an e-mail account. In his eyes I suddenly changed from someone suspected of losing the remote control to someone who could fix e-mail. The power felt good. And similar shifts in power were happening across the country.</p>
<p>The success of the &quot;nerds are finally ruling!&quot; framework comes from a two-fold desire: 1) to see the underdog win and 2) to see ourselves as that underdog. Despite the undeniable success of nerds, they still iconically stand for &quot;underdog&quot; and we all insist on being that underdog.</p>
<p>Ask anyone what they were like in high school and he or she will invariably say &quot;Oh, I was such a nerd in high school.&quot; No one would say: &quot;Oh, me? I was popular! Hated those nerds!&quot;</p>
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<p><br />
I&#039;m as guilty as anyone. First thing I remember about high school was that I got varsity letters for math team, chess team, and marching band. This is true: my school (Danbury High, from the mean streets of rural Connecticut) awarded varsity letters to any club that competed against other schools. I have an improbably puffy letter D emblazoned with a trumpet, knight, and alpha.</p>
<p>Makes for a good story and solidly establishes my nerd pedigree. Let the sympathetic views pour forth!</p>
<p>What I never tell anyone is that I was elected prom king. And that&#039;s because no one knows. At my prom, which I attended with an actual human girl as my date, my class advisor pulled me aside and excitedly told me, &quot;You&#039;re gonna be prom king!&quot;</p>
<p>And I begged her, <span class="caps">BEGGED</span> her, to make that not true. &quot;I can&#039;t be prom king, it would be humiliating,&quot; I told her. My friends hated the popular people, and I knew it. There was no way that I wanted to be coronated forever as a, gulp, <span class="caps">WINNER</span>. After listening to me ramble about chronic stage fright and threats of a nervous breakdown, she relented. And someone else was announced as prom king.</p>
<p>The nerds, and the allure of being one, has ruled for a long time.</p>
<p>Frankly, I wish more people wanted to be known as jocks. We need them. Hemingway was a jock. Teddy Roosevelt. Amelia Fucking Earhart. Mickey Mantle. People who stood their ground, spoke their minds and made no apologies for being awesome. In an era when politicians parse every last syllable of their sound bytes with fear and camouflage, we need people who are fearless, task-oriented, and who know the power of a simple declarative sentence. Someone to call a play, hit the homerun, and make no apologies to anyone.</p>
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<p><br />
Comic-Con? We need a Jock-Con, where former homecoming heroes come from across the country and dress up like the cast of Hoosiers. I want Joss Whedon to re-make Rudy. And Barack Obama to stop quoting literature and humiliate Mitt Romney in an arm wrestle (he probably could, and it would be awesome).</p>
<p>Look for &quot;Revenge of the Jocks,&quot; a ten-part movie franchise, to start this summer!</p>
<p>Unless Tina Fey divorces her husband and asks me out in Elvish, in which case I surrender my opinion immediately.</p>
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<small> <i> Stock photos via <a href="//www.shutterstock.com/">shutterstock.com</a> </i> </small></p>nonadultcomedy/post/6837859http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6837859/stop-putting-good-news-on-facebook
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:00:04 -0400<p>Social media connects us to more people than ever. Unfortunately, it connects us to a super-happy, sepia-toned, brunch-ridden view of each other&#039;s best sides that leaves us quivering piles of jealous sweat.</p>
<p>It does for me at least. These days, I can&#039;t log on to the internet without wincing in fear of what terrible way I&#039;m about to compare myself to everyone I know.</p>
<p>Facebook in particular has changed from a place where I once checked to see if my crushes from high school were still attractive into a devastating achievement parade of weddings, babies, beautiful vacation photos and righteous political quotes. </p>
<p>Full disclosure: I am particularly prone to jealousy. I once got envious of the attention a friend of mine paid to the South Dakota state quarter. Still, even an emotionally rational person must get irritated by the just-below-bragging line level of celebrating that happens on Facebook.</p>
<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/86/90/91c187361c4cd54009ce4f72924ed49d-stop-putting-good-news-on-facebook.jpg" width="600" height="317" alt="Stop Putting Good News On Facebook - Image 1" /></div></div>
<p>My gut instinct is to fight back and devote my life to destroying the internet. But that is a) emotionally counterproductive, and b) hard. </p>
<p>Instead I would like all of us to agree to simple policy for social media: For every four flattering things you post on Facebook, you must also post one unflattering thing.</p>
<p>By &quot;flattering things&quot; I mean to keep doing what you&#039;re already doing: </p>
<ul>
<li>the famous person you saw walk by you on your trip to Los Angeles,</li>
<li>the arm-in-arm photo with your significant other,</li>
<li>the photo of your baby, which will be your profile photo until you die,</li>
<li>the friends at brunch, brandishing Bloody Marys</li>
<li>the half-marathon time,</li>
<li>the Spotify playlist with Katy Perry removed and Nick Drake added</li>
</ul>
<p>Keep &#039;em coming. But after four of those you have to put one unflattering thing.</p>
<p>But by &quot;unflattering thing&quot; I mean one honest detail of your life that you&#039;re not proud of. Limited to but not including: </p>
<ul>
<li>photo of you hauling a recycling bag of wine bottles out to the curb</li>
<li>video of you eating no less than three Krispy Kreme donuts while watching <span class="caps">DVR</span> of American Idol after midnight</li>
<li>mp3 of you drunk dialing your ex</li>
<li>photo of any body hair</li>
<li>tumblr post admitting you got bored while masturbating</li>
<li>Instagram photo of yourself in fluorescent lighting, no filter, shot from below so you have like five chins.</li>
<li>list of the last three books you read, but really. Must include one paperback bought at an airport and/or Us Magazine.</li>
</ul>
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<p>What does <span class="caps">NOT</span> count as unflattering is anything you&#039;d call a &quot;guilty pleasure.&quot; When people confess to a guilty pleasure, they generally mean that they watch The Bachelor or listen to Katy Perry. Those are not guilty pleasures. Those are pleasures. Because you don&#039;t feel guilty.</p>
<p>A truly guilty pleasure would be hearing that someone you didn&#039;t like in high school just got divorced, and smiling. You&#039;d be happy, but you&#039;d feel guilty about that happiness. By the way, I would count that as an unflattering thing. &quot;Just smiled when I heard that Danny Sprock got divorced.&quot;</p>
<p>Here&#039;s the thing about putting unflattering things on Facebook: one, I would feel better. </p>
<p>But two, putting negative things about yourself will make people like you more. We like what we understand. And you don&#039;t really understand someone until you know their (inevitable) bad side.</p>
<p>I learned this at an extremely unlikely time: the memorial service for my uncle. Even for a memorial service, this was sad as my uncle had been young (50s) before dying from cancer. My aunt, genuinely grief stricken, stepped to the front of the service and delivered a moving eulogy. In it, she listed the many great qualities of my uncle: his generosity, his intellectual curiosity&#133;</p>
<p>Then she took a breath and said, &quot;Now in the interest of fair reporting I would like to list his faults.&quot; And she did: his tardiness, his easy-going nature that sometimes devolved into laziness, his weakness for weed (is it a fault? certainly in a eulogy it sounds like one). The rest of us were shocked, then smiling, then laughing. What my aunt was saying was true. And familiar. And warm. </p>
<p>My aunt is a uniquely insightful and, honestly, bizarre person. I&#039;m not advocating that we go onto Facebook and list the faults of our deceased loved ones (though I don&#039;t doubt that has happened and been then put on Reddit). But she demonstrated that the best way to really let others know someone is to let them see the unflattering side. </p>
<p>So after your hike up Bear Mountain, your photo of your engagement ring, your mp3 of an obscure Arcade Fire track, and your status of seeing Ryan Gosling at a farmer&#039;s market: upload the shot of your earwax. It would be good for the world.</p>nonadultcomedy/post/6834685http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6834685/strategies-for-murder-750-754
Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:00:04 -0400<p><em>Another in a series of strategies for murdering your fellow humans. For more obvious plans, see earlier installments. This series assume you are looking to murder, which is a behavior we do not endorse or recommend.</em> <br />
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</p>
<p><div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/49/16/92505be32fa6ee5ed384f12082188c39-strategies-for-murder-750-754.jpg" width="600" height="375" alt="Strategies For Murder, 750754 - Image 1" /></div></div><strong>750. <span class="caps">THE</span> <span class="caps">GODDAMN</span> <span class="caps">STAIRS</span></strong></p>
<p>Humans, by nature, reach the top of a flight of a stairs and then just stand there for about fifteen years. Here in New York City you see this phenomenon most notably in subway stations, where people emerge into Times Square and then plant their feet solidly, oblivious to the one hundred million people coming up the stairs behind them.</p>
<p>No one is exempt from this instinct. Nice people, jerks, geniuses, idiots. There is something in the genetic code of the human being that tells it to <span class="caps">STOP</span> and <span class="caps">WAIT</span> <span class="caps">FOREVER</span> when you reach the top of the stairs. I assume that in cavemen times, there was some breed of saber-tooth tiger that loomed above the entrances to caves, and every one of our ancestors who stepped boldly out of his cave with no hesitation was instantly murdered and removed from the gene pool.</p>
<p>Regardless of the cause, this behavior is not only undeniable but powerful. People don&#039;t just wait for a second. They stop, they let their jaws go slack, they stare up and around, like they have never seen the sky before, or learned how to walk. They stare with their hearts full of wonder! Look, the top of the stairs! I never could have dreamed!</p>
<p>Extra-dumb: people do this when they are home also. They get to the top of the stairs, put their hands on their hips and think &quot;Now, what did I come up here for?&quot; Their conscious minds have been erased by the happiness of reaching the stairs.</p>
<p><span class="caps">PLAN</span>: Put a bunch of stairs in the woods and fields of the Earth. When humans see them they will happily walk to the top and stand there. Pick them off with an automatic rifle.</p>
<p><span class="caps">SPECIAL</span> <span class="caps">INGREDIENTS</span>: Detached stairs, sniper rifle.</p>
<p><br />
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<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/62/63/c9139dd9c898b242cbadc8358a7deeeb-strategies-for-murder-750-754.jpg" width="600" height="527" alt="Strategies For Murder, 750754 - Image 4" /></div></div><strong>751. <span class="caps">HALL</span> <span class="caps">AND</span> <span class="caps">OATES</span></strong></p>
<p>Hall and Oates cracked the top ten about 4500 times in the late 1970s and 1980s with songs like &quot;Private Eyes,&quot; &quot;Rich Girl&quot; and &quot;Maneater.&quot; They fell out of style&#133; never. Their songs have been played continuously on the radio, as hold music, at stadiums, during movie montages and on everyone&#039;s personalized Pandora stations.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, there&#039;s always some jerk in a group of friends who hears Hall &amp; Oates songs and thinks he/she is discovering them for the first time.</p>
<p>&quot;You know who&#039;s great?&quot; these people say. &quot;Hall &amp; Oates. Have you ever heard them?&quot; Then they lean back in their chairs and place their hands behind their heads, smugly satisfied.</p>
<p>This is not like being the first to dig up Nick Drake, or the Neutral Milk Hotel, or Mos Def. This is like saying you found a cool American landmark, and it&#039;s called The Mississippi River.</p>
<p><span class="caps">PLAN</span>: Go to a busy city square. Start playing Hall &amp; Oates very loudly on a stereo system. As people smile and start recommending it to the person standing next to them, unleash a flood of napalm into the square.</p>
<p><span class="caps">SPECIAL</span> <span class="caps">INGREDIENTS</span>: A city square, napalm.</p>
<p><span class="caps">QUALIFIER</span>: I am one of these people described. Hall &amp; Oates: Have you ever heard them? Oh, you really should.</p>
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<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://1.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/88/87/c627a7e82a6533931c7b006721e8f945-strategies-for-murder-750-754.jpg" width="600" height="375" alt="Strategies For Murder, 750754 - Image 1" /></div></div><strong>752. <span class="caps">ATM</span>s</strong></p>
<p>Facts: people are scared of computers, of reading, and of facing their finances. <span class="caps">ATM</span>s present all three in a neat little package of knee-rattling intimidation. Thus, there are few weapons more potent for subduing a human being than the digital glow of an <span class="caps">ATM</span> screen.</p>
<p>Here are things people can generally do with little effort or stress: open a lid on hot coffee while driving a stick-shift car; talk to two people at once while also watching a movie; trod down a steep staircase while dialing their smart phones. But <span class="caps">ATM</span>s flummox everyone. You stop in front of them and stare, uncertain of your every move.</p>
<p>&quot;Checking&quot; or &quot;savings&quot; or the ever-mysterious &quot;other&quot;? Such a question paralyzes us all. And that&#039;s only the first question you must answer. Do we want to pay the extra fee for using an <span class="caps">ATM</span> outside our bank (yes, always)? Can you think of an amount in a denomination of twenty dollars (sure)? Would we like a receipt? (Yes, but I&#039;m throwing it away in ten seconds). And would you like to see your balance first (God, no)? Each and every question freeze the customer in place, as he/she dangles a finger above the screen scared to press down and make a choice.</p>
<p>For people over 50, it&#039;s even worse. Sure, a spry 18-year-old seems confused in front of all <span class="caps">ATM</span>s, but someone over 50 freezes in place so long they are in danger of starving to death. </p>
<p>Sure, eventually you figure it out. After all, you use <span class="caps">ATM</span>s all the time (actual number of bank tellers in the US today: three). But it takes you a while, and when you walk away you still look preoccupied, distant, as if you were visited by a glowing, touch-screen version of God.</p>
<p><span class="caps">PLAN</span>: Get a bunch of inactive <span class="caps">ATM</span>s. Scatter them into a field. Tell people there&#039;s a free concert featuring Katy Perry, Radiohead, Queens of the Stone Age and a reincarnated James Brown. Once people get there and see the <span class="caps">ATM</span>s, they will gather around and stare. At that time, hurl a series of replacement buzzsaw blades at their necks and take them out.</p>
<p><span class="caps">SPECIAL</span> <span class="caps">INGREDIENTS</span>: Inactive <span class="caps">ATM</span>s, buzzsaw blades, remarkable dexterity.</p>
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<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/63/46/ec176ed3fc258d28f3bc72a173322ff1-strategies-for-murder-750-754.jpg" width="600" height="400" alt="Strategies For Murder, 750754 - Image 4" /></div></div><strong>753. <span class="caps">ANECDOTES</span></strong></p>
<p>People get together. People tell anecdotes. Notice, please, that all anecdotes fall into two categories:</p>
<p>1) <span class="caps">GET</span> A <span class="caps">LOAD</span> OF <span class="caps">THIS</span> <span class="caps">IDIOT</span>, and2) <span class="caps">CHECK</span> <span class="caps">OUT</span> <span class="caps">HOW</span> <span class="caps">MUCH</span> <span class="caps">MONEY</span> I <span class="caps">SAVED</span>.</p>
<p>&quot;Get A Load Of This Idiot&quot; can include complaining about relatives who are not present, people you saw at the mall, or the current president of the United States. &quot;Listen To How I Saved Money&quot; stories are almost exclusively about how to rig your cable boxes to get you free channels. These are the only topics humans are interested in saying to each other. </p>
<p>SO: Gather a large amount of capital, buy a large commercial block on prime time television. Start your commercial with some graphics that read &quot;<span class="caps">GET</span> A <span class="caps">LOAD</span> OF <span class="caps">THIS</span> <span class="caps">IDIOT</span>.&quot; Then launch a drone attack on America&#039;s homes.</p>
<p><span class="caps">SPECIAL</span> <span class="caps">INGREDIENTS</span>: Large amount of capital, fleet of drones.</p>
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<div class="media"><div class="embed center"><img src="http://2.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/80/31/0ffa3b46efb2388f9147650d619fa857-strategies-for-murder-750-754.jpg" width="600" height="527" alt="Strategies For Murder, 750754 - Image 6" /></div></div><strong>754. <span class="caps">SET</span> <span class="caps">EVERYTHING</span> ON <span class="caps">FIRE</span></strong></p>
<p>This would work too.</p>
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<em>Thank you for your time! Please remember that we do not condone murder. Just thinking about it.</em></p>
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